


Meeting of Minds

by initialism



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Mildly Dubious Consent, Other, Tentacle Sex, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:15:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23318950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/initialism/pseuds/initialism
Summary: Saw's first encounter with Bor Gullet.
Relationships: Saw Gerrera/Bor Gullet
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2020





	Meeting of Minds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aurae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurae/gifts).



Saw gave a yell as the last stormtrooper fell to his blaster barrage. The partisans surged forward to the cells, blasting open doors, slicing forcefield controls, and celebrating as their comrades were released.

Not that their captured compatriots were the only people aboard the transport they had intercepted. The common criminals scattered as fast as they could, probably hunting for any escape pods the Imperials hadn't already used. A group of Rebel pilots -- probably a squadron whose mission had gone horribly wrong -- hunched together, talking in low voices, nervously eyeing the Partisans.

"Don't worry," Saw told them. "We'll send you back to Mon Mothma. Probably."

"Boss!" came a shout. "I think we have a situation."

Saw pounded down the corridor, supporting his heavy repeating blaster with both arms.

He found a number of his crew staring in through a tiny transparisteel window set into a reinforced door. As he reached them, they made a space for him, then stared past him at either shoulder.

"Have you ever seen anything like that before?" Griss said over his shoulder.

"It's an interrogation room," Axon said. "Pretty standard Imperial setup, except--"

"Exactly," Griss said. "I'm not talking about the _room_ , I'm talking about the enormous monster at the back of it."

Saw could barely hear what they were saying -- he was transfixed by the sight of the tentacle slithering across the floor from the dimly lit area at the back of the room. Two milky eyes reflected a tiny amount of light, like dim stars against the vast blackness of space.

"I think ... I think it might be a prisoner too," Saw said.

"Are you insane?"

"I'm Saw Gerrera," he said.

"You know that didn't actually answer the question, right?"

"Open the door. Close it again once I'm through. If that thing makes it out and I don't-- Well, usual tactics apply."

"Blast it with everything we've got?" Griss said.

Kadika, his best slicer, already had the door control panel open, its innards exposed. "You're sure about this?"

Saw just nodded. Kadika swallowed as she touched together the cables. The door opened and Saw stepped through.

Saw stood still and waited for the door to close. The solitary tentacle he had seen first continued to swish back and forth, but there was no immediate sign that the creature was aware of his presence. It didn't seem as though eyesight was its primary sense.

But nor had it responded to the pressure changes as the door opened and closed, or the vibrations caused by Saw walking in. It wasn't as though his right leg was light. Perhaps it was simply biding its time.

Saw stepped forward. "We-- _I_ don't think you're here willingly. Are you?" He took a sidestep around the interrogation chair, its restraints lying open like metal traps waiting to be sprung.

Saw suddenly felt foolish. An unfamiliar and unwelcome sensation, and not one that was in any way diminished by imagining what the others were saying on the other side of the door. But if the huge vibrations of his footsteps hadn't caused any discernible change, would it really respond to him simply speaking?

And yet, he still felt the need to explain what he was doing. "I'm going to put my gun down now," he said, placing it carefully on the table that would usually be filled by some Imperial officer's "equipment".

He took another step closer. The single tentacle that he had seen before continued to move back and forth across the floor, but now that he was drawing closer, Saw could see the rest of the creature: a great bulbous mass, resting on tentacles folded underneath it, others waving back and forth in the same slow motions as the one near him. Something about the motion suddenly struck him as desperately sad.

"I'm not going to hurt you. And I trust you not to hurt me."

For a moment, there was a sound from the creature, a sort of liquid gurgling. Whether or not it was a response, he couldn't be sure.

Saw knelt down, reaching out towards the tentacle. After a long moment of hesitation, he took off his glove, so that his bare skin could touch the creature's.

And then, there was a response that was impossible to deny. The tentacle he had reached out to wrapped itself around his arm, dragging him closer to the creature. At the same time, the other tentacles slapped forwards, pulling on his other limbs, drawing them closer to the massive bulk of the creature.

At the same time as the physical entrapment, there was a mental connection. There were no words, only a deep sense of loss, of disconnection -- and of a longing for anything that could replace it.

Soon, the creature had him trapped against its bulk, but with the sense of anguish he had just experienced it felt more like a desperate embrace than an assault.

Saw had been turned round so that he could no longer see the creature, but rather the agitated faces of his comrades through the tiny window -- only a few metres away, but it may as well have been light years. They were clearly preparing to re-open the door and mount a rescue. "No!" he shouted, and he no longer knew whether it was his own voice, or the creature speaking through him. The distinction between the two seemed to be blurring further with every passing second.

Kadika had clearly figured out more of the controls -- the sight of them through the transparisteel disappeared, as a secondary bulkhead slammed down. They would obey his orders, but they would protect themselves as well. He would expect nothing less.

More tentacles wrapped themselves around him, one curling around his neck, another probing into his pressure suit.

_~We are not afraid. | Why are we not afraid?~_

The greater the skin-to-skin contact, the stronger the telepathic connection, it seemed. Saw felt another tentacle sliding past the one at his neck, wrapping itself around his torso, while the first one to enter his suit went lower still. There was a burst of air as the suit ventilated, maintaining its regulated pressure even with this new mass inside it.

And then, the first tentacle burst through his undergarments, seemingly instinctively seeking the greatest possible contact. Saw grimaced at the momentary pain as it thrust into his ass, but then was overwhelmed by entirely different sensations as the connection deepened.

_~We will think our thoughts. | We will think them together.~_

Confusing visions entered Saw's mind -- he felt for a moment as though he was the creature, his entire biology different -- larger and slower. And at the same time, he felt microscopic, part of an immensely larger whole.

_~The homeworld. | The worldbrain.~_

And another word: _~Bor | Bor~_. The planet? Its inhabitants? Both, and neither -- rather, the collective whole. The confusing visions began to coalesce; a swamp world, its vegetation hanging low over writhing masses of creatures like the one he was with now, constantly connecting to each other, tentacle-to-tentacle, bulk-to-bulk. In a blinding flash of insight, Saw _understood_ \-- each creature by itself had only relatively simple biological functions, the instincts and drives that even the most primitive organisms had to have to survive, not sentient in the usual sense at all. And yet, together, the mental connections between them formed the pathways of an intellect far beyond human understanding, a huge planet-sized mind, thinking slow, deliberate thoughts. Saw could only grasp the very beginnings of that understanding, reflected imperfectly as it was in the memories of this one facet of the whole. He could see that they had worked out a great deal of astronomy, simply from observation of the night sky -- he had a clear sense of exactly where in the galaxy this world was -- but there were vast oceans of philosophy and abstract mathematics that ran along entirely alien lines.

The vision shifted. Sonic booms as huge vessels crashed into the atmosphere. Metal -- almost unknown to Bor -- landing on the surface and blasterfire everywhere. The world forest on fire, parts of the worldbrain torn apart, taken on board the ships--

_~The invaders. | The kidnappers.~_

The Bor worldbrain might have understood its physical place in the galaxy, but was entirely ignorant of the political reality. The creature's memories changed at that point, could now only be interpreted through Saw's own perceptions. Without the connection to the worldbrain, its own sub-sentient thought processes were dim, until they found another connection. But find another connection they had -- many times over, in the prisoners the Imperials had brought before it. Each individual human brain, though very differently constructed, was sufficiently complex as to be the same as a subunit made up of tens of thousands of Bor creatures. Enough for true thought to take place once more. But the prisoners had been too afraid -- of the Empire, of the creature itself -- for any real connection to be established. The Imperials had thought of the creatures they had stolen away as nothing more than exotic lie detectors, the overwhelming nature of the attempted connection stripping away any ability of their prisoners to dissemble, if it didn't render them completely insensible.

And still, even as the avalanche of memories caught up with the presence, the tentacles pressed further into his suit, inside him. Through the mental link, the creature seemed to be able to understand just how much pressure his throat could withstand before his breathing would be cut off, but it applied exactly that amount, desperate for the contact. There was the same paradoxical tenderness about its probing of his ass, and the way the tentacle wrapped around his torso slid further to engulf his now-hard cock.

Saw could feel his personality fraying, at risk of being lost in the Bor's instinctive desire to be part of a group mind. He held tight to the ideas that drove him most strongly, and found them reflected in the Bor, in its memory of the sundering of the worldbrain.

_~We will fight the Empire. | We will avenge.~_

It was as the tentacles began to withdraw that Saw reached his climax, as much a visceral reaction to the new telepathic understanding they had developed as the result of the sheer physical stimulation he had been undergoing. An involuntary sound, half-liquid, half-strangled, emerged from his throat as his seed spilled inside the pressure suit.

The tentacle that he had first touched lingered last. The connection was still there, but attenuated; Saw could separate his own thought processes once more, even as the creature still borrowed the ability of his brain to do some of its thinking for it.

_~Come with me. | I have nowhere else to go.~_

The creature had not had a sense of individual identity before, he was certain of it. A double-edged sword, to be sure -- for if it now understood its own existence, it understood all that it had lost.

_~You will need a name. | Gullet.~_

It took Saw a moment to realise that it was a reflection of the noise he had made as he came. "Very well," he said out loud, as he finally removed his hand. "Gullet."

Saw adjusted himself to try to minimise how dishevelled he would appear to his crew, then crossed to the doorway, banging loudly on the metal of the door. "I'm coming out!" he said.

It took Kadika a few moments to re-open the bulkhead, then the doorway proper, but soon enough Saw was able to step through the doorway, Gullet following in a slither.

The others stood stiffly, their underlying respect for him suppressing any fear they might be feeling. Or amusement, for that matter, if they had their suspicions about what might have just happened.

"Ladies, gentlemen," he said, "I'd like you to meet our latest recruit."


End file.
